Often the coinciding events during this transit reflected all of these qualities, as several of the examples above suggest. Neither Freud nor Jung especially sought out or welcomed the challenging psychological states that emerged for them at this time, yet both the intellectual fruits and the internal growth that resulted from this period constituted significant breakthroughs that unfolded throughout the rest of their lives. The impulses and actions taken during this transit by Rosa Parks or Galileo were both personally and culturally liberating, but their effect was also to initiate a succession of highly challenging, destabilizing events in their lives and their world.
Similarly, the individual’s attitude towards the coinciding phenomena varied considerably. The external changes and even the internal impulses might be enthusiastically embraced or simply coped with. They might be actively nurtured and developed or strenuously opposed and suppressed. No specific form of event or response seemed foreordained, nor was any specific outcome. What was consistent was the underlying archetypal quality of sudden or rapid significant change, novelty from within or without, experiment, uncertainty, and unexpected shifts in life circumstances or personal vision. The common denominator appeared to be the constellation of a state of being in which one’s domain of experience was suddenly pressed beyond the accustomed status quo towards new horizons, irrespective of whether the previous condition was viewed as providing stable security or oppressive constraint.
The case of Betty Friedan during this transit is instructive, as it involves both personal and collective dimensions closely interwoven. On the one hand, exemplifying one side of the archetypal pattern, The Feminine Mystique represented in itself a major creative breakthrough—both personal and societal, as well as both intellectual and psychological—that mediated a sudden shift of perspective and new existential possibilities. On the other hand, the specific focus of the book was on the very issues whose emergence in individual lives regularly coincided with this transit but that were here addressed on a larger societal scale: “the problem with no name,” the increasing restlessness of modern women experiencing the confinement of traditional patriarchal social structures. The book gave voice to, as it helped catalyze, a newly conscious desire in women to break free from established social roles to explore a larger range of activities and avenues for self-realization. Thus both the restless condition Friedan addressed and diagnosed in The Feminine Mystique and the creative breakthrough represented by her writing the book illustrate two of the most characteristic patterns I observed with this transit.
Considered on its own, apart from any other correlations, the coincidence between this stage of potential transition or transformation in many individuals’ lives and the Uranus opposition transit would have been suggestive but of course hardly decisive. What made it more compelling was its being embedded in a much larger interconnected pattern of correlations involving the same planet and the same archetypal principle. For example, before the opposition point of the Uranus cycle in each individual’s life there is an earlier period in which Uranus reaches the first quadrature alignment, or dynamic hard aspect, of its cycle—the 90° square, which occurs midway between birth and the 180° opposition just discussed. This Uranus-square-Uranus transit coincides with a three-year period in the late teens and early twenties when youthful rebellion and striving for independence is typically at a peak. Again, as with the opposition point of the same cycle, a radically heightened emancipatory impulse appears to be consistently catalyzed during these years, one that impels youth to make its first fundamental break from structures established or upheld by the previous generation. The restless striving for unconstrained autonomy that increases in strength throughout the teen years, as expressed in acts of social rebellion and unpredictable changes of behavior, is fully catalyzed and empowered during this period and reaches a climax. Both the encounter with and the impulse to experiment with new forms of experience, new perspectives, new relationships, and new fields of action are rapidly accelerated and intensified.
That the majority of college students and senior high school students are undergoing this transit was at least archetypally congruent with the fact that universities and high schools so often serve as a kind of hotbed of rebellious, liberating, creative, impulsive, and disruptive behavior and ideas. So also in youths of the same age on the street (or, increasingly in the United States, in prison). Equally suggestive were the frequent spontaneous connections that psychologists and sociologists make between these two periods of life—the square and the opposition of the Uranus cycle—often referring to the midlife crisis period as a “second adolescence.” In both these periods, individuals seemed to feel driven to break out of conventional structures imposed by society, family, or their own psyche to experiment and explore, to seek greater freedom, creative self-expression, new ideas, and new horizons. Moreover, in coincidence with these self-initiated events and newly emergent impulses, an equally prominent tendency in both periods is the occurrence of unpredictable, destabilizing, and disruptive events.
In highly creative individuals, one can often recognize quite specific developmental connections between the two periods involved. For example, in the case of Newton, the square and opposition points of the Uranus cycle precisely coincided with the two famous periods of his life that brought forth his most important scientific achievements. From January 1664 to December 1666, Uranus was at the 90° point of its cycle, within 5° of exact alignment. It was precisely during the years 1664 to 1666, when he was in his early twenties, that Newton laid most of the foundations for his later work: developing the binomial theorem and the calculus, performing advanced research in optics, and deriving the inverse square relation for planetary motion. This was the period when, according to Newton’s own account, the incident of the falling apple took place. As the historian of science D. T. Whiteside observed, “In two short years, summer 1664 to October 1666, Newton the mathematician was born, and in a sense the rest of his creative life was largely the working out, in calculus as in his mathematical thought in general, of the mass of burgeoning ideas which sprouted in his mind on the threshold of intellectual maturity.” Newton himself wrote of this period, “I was in the prime of my age for invention and minded Mathematics and Philosophy more than at any time since.”
Thus a perfect symmetrical pattern was visible in the larger trajectory of Newton’s life: These early discoveries, which were the necessary forerunners of the Principia, occurred when Uranus had moved 90° from its position at Newton’s birth, while the Principia itself, containing his formulation of the three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation, was published when Uranus had moved exactly 90° further, to form the 180° opposition.
These and many correlations like them suggested to me the possibility that there existed in each life a significant archetypal connection and continuity between events that coincided with the successive major alignments of the Uranus transit cycle. The nature of the evidence seemed to indicate the existence of a constant correlation between the Uranus transit cycle and activations of an archetypal principle having a Promethean character—emancipatory, rebellious, inventive, unpredictable, mediating sudden change and new realities—visible in the specific quality and timing of these various events and breakthroughs. Numerous other factors, such as the specific planets forming aspects to Uranus in the natal chart and the presence of other concurrent transits, were also relevant for assessing the exact character and timing of these correlations. Apart from the Uranus-Uranus cycle, many comparable events with these same qualities coincided with transits in which Uranus was transiting another important point in the natal chart (e.g., transiting Uranus conjunct natal Sun, as when James Joyce wrote Ulysses, beginning in 1914), or in which another outer planet in the sky was transiting natal Uranus (e.g., transiting Pluto conjunct natal Uranus, as when Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in June 1776).18 Yet the Uranus-Uranus transit cycle on its own terms appeared to represent an especially significan
t cyclical pattern for what seemed to be an unfolding Promethean impulse.
With the full 360° Uranus cycle taking eighty-four years to complete itself, the life trajectory of many individuals does not afford the possibility of comparable correlations during the period when Uranus reaches conjunction with its original position at the person’s birth (a transit referred to as the “Uranus return”). However, among those just cited, Freud lived to his eighty-fourth year, and just as Uranus reached the point of conjunction in the summer of 1938, when he was suddenly compelled by the Nazis’ takeover in Austria to move to London for what turned out to be the last months of his life, he wrote his brilliant, succinctly definitive summary of psychoanalytic theory, An Outline of Psychoanalysis. His last book, the celebrated Outline was in effect a synopsis of his life’s work. Moreover, this same period also saw the completion and publication of his Moses and Monotheism, a work of personal summation as well, both because it had so long occupied his attention and because it analyzed the revolutionary cultural figure with whom Freud had identified throughout his life.
Similarly, Jung lived to the age of eighty-five. When the Uranus cycle in his life reached the 360° point of completion, with transiting Uranus having moved into conjunction with its natal position from 1957 to 1960, Jung composed his celebrated life summary, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Thus both Freud and Jung wrote summations of their life’s revolutionary work precisely during the period coincident with Uranus’s conjunction to itself at the end of its cycle.
A clear sequential pattern is thus visible in both cases: In Freud’s life, the 180° halfway point of the Uranus cycle that occurred in 1895–97 coincided with his period of major breakthrough—the beginning of his self-analysis, his formulation of the basic concepts of psychoanalysis, and the start of his writing his foundational work, The Interpretation of Dreams—and the 360° point of the cycle’s completion coincided with his lifework summations, the Outline of Psychoanalysis and Moses and Monotheism. In Jung’s life, the same symmetrical pattern was visible, with the halfway point of the Uranus cycle during the 1914–17 period coinciding with the seminal turning point of his life both intellectually and psychologically (as he later described in Memories, Dreams, Reflections), and the cycle’s completion coincided with the writing of Memories, Dreams, Reflections itself, his life summary.19
Similarly suggestive patterns of the full cycle were evident at the collective level. For example, if one considers the birth of the United States to be July 4, 1776, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the full Uranus cycle was completed eighty-four years later when the Civil War began, in April 1861, within 1° of exact alignment. This dramatic period in the history of the United States brought what Abraham Lincoln called “a new birth of freedom” to a nation conceived in liberty but until then deeply oppressed, compromised, and corrupted by the institution of slavery. Similarly, the next Uranus cycle was completed in the life of the United States in the mid-1940s. This Uranus return reached exact alignment one week before D-day in June 1944, as the Allies began the liberation of Europe from the Nazis, and continued through 1945 in coincidence with the successful end of World War II, the emergence of the United States as a dominant power in the world, and the founding of the United Nations.
The Structural Unfolding of Life: The Saturn Cycle
Another planetary transit cycle in which distinctive archetypal correlations can be easily recognized in individual biographies is the Saturn cycle, approximately twenty-nine and a half years in length. All individuals go through the first Saturn return transit from about the age of twenty-eight through age thirty, a three-year period in the course of which a characteristic complex of biographical events and experiences seems to occur with remarkable consistency.20 During these years individuals tend to experience their lives as distinctly coming to the end of an era—bringing the years of youth to a close and initiating the person, in an often challenging way, into the principal period of mature activity in the world in engagement with the established social order.
In examining many hundreds of individual biographies, I observed that during the years from age twenty-eight to thirty, a tangibly different, usually more serious posture towards life, work, long-term goals, security, parents, tradition, and established social structures tended to emerge. At this time, the wider aspirations and wanderings of youth seemed to undergo a transformation, becoming focused on and grounded in concrete practicalities and particular commitments: vocational, relational, intellectual, psychological, spiritual. Significant relationships often came to an end, and others of enduring consequence began. Modes of being that had characterized the preceding years were now outgrown and decisively left behind as no longer appropriate, or ineluctably taken away by changing life circumstances. The consequences of past actions and events tended to emerge and require assimilation, and a growing tendency to engage in serious self-reflection and biographical retrospection was typical.
In coincidence with the Saturn return transit, the challenging realities of life and death, time and aging, loss and adversity, work and responsibility became dominant concerns in a distinctly different manner from how these same realities were experienced in one’s teens or twenties. Equally characteristic during this three-year transit was a definite sense of existential compression or contraction, generally accompanied by obstacles, limitations, and frustrations of various kinds—financial, physical, relational—and often including a definite encounter with human mortality, finitude, and fallibility. For some, the years of this transit near age thirty marked a psychological transformation that brought an end to the more creative, adventurous, open-minded and free-spirited youthful self and the establishment of a more rigidly conservative, constrained, and risk-averse personality identified with the status quo and unquestioned conventional values. By contrast, many others seemed to resolve this archetypal transition through the strenuous forging of a synthesis of the aspiring, creative impulses of youth with the structuring, stabilizing, disciplining, foundation-building impulses of maturity.
In either case, the often noted, fairly easily recognizable difference between individuals who are over thirty from those younger than thirty seemed to be associated with the decisive emergence in just these years of personal qualities and life circumstances whose common qualities all seemed to be comprehensible in terms of the Saturn archetype being potently constellated at that time.21 The following description by Gertrude Stein, from her early work Fernhurst, well describes a characteristic form of the life transition that consistently coincides with the Saturn return period:
It happens often in the twenty-ninth year of life that all the forces that have been engaged through the years of childhood, adolescence and youth in confused and ferocious combat range themselves in ordered ranks—one is uncertain of one’s aims, meaning and power during these years of tumultuous growth when aspiration has no relation to fulfillment and one plunges here and there with energy and misdirection during the storm and stress of the making of a personality until at last we reach the twenty-ninth year, the straight and narrow gateway of maturity and life which was all uproar and confusion narrows down to form and purpose and we exchange a great dim possibility for a small hard reality.
Also in our American life where there is no coercion in custom and it is our right to change our vocation so often as we have desire and opportunity, it is a common experience that our youth extends through the whole first twenty-nine years of our life and it is not until we reach thirty that we find at last that vocation for which we feel ourselves fit and to which we willingly devote continued labor.
In researching hundreds of biographies to examine the nature of each individual’s life trajectory, I regularly observed that the succeeding three decades—the person’s thirties, forties, and fifties—could be seen in retrospect to have been decisively shaped by the structural transformations that took place during the first Saturn return transit between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty. One’s first symphony is c
omposed and first public concert takes place (Beethoven); one’s major professional association is established (Shakespeare becomes a member of the Globe’s company of players and their chief playwright); one’s pivotal career appointment is received (Ficino as head of the Platonic Academy of Florence, Luther as teacher of biblical theology at Wittenberg, Kepler as Imperial Mathematician in Prague, Galileo as professor of mathematics in Padua, William James as lecturer in science at Harvard); one’s first significant achievement occurs (Marie Curie discovers radium and polonium, Niels Bohr formulates his theory of atomic structure); one’s first significant public recognition takes place (Newton is elected to the Royal Society, Georgia O’Keeffe has her first exhibition at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery, Duke Ellington begins his five-year engagement at the Cotton Club); one’s first major public act takes place that defines one’s subsequent career (Demosthenes’s first major speech before the Athenian Assembly, Martin Luther King’s participation and arrest in a protest against racial segregation in Atlanta).
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